Mike Lupica, the ESPN host and regular panelist on the network’s Sunday “The Sports Reporters” program, wrote in a column that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin addressed “mean,” “dumb,” “angry,” and phony patriots at the NRA convention last Friday in Houston, Texas.

In a New York Daily Newscolumn published late Sunday evening, Lupica also called NRA attendees the “craziest and creepiest gun lovers on the planet” who are also “phonies” who think “they’re patriots and brave defenders of the Second Amendment.”

In a column dripping with vitriol, the liberal columnist who has used his platform on ESPN to himself exploit gun-related tragedies to his political agenda wrote that the “leaders of the NRA don’t speak for responsible gun owners in America, and never have.”

“They don’t even speak to the spirit of the Second Amendment, written about a thousand years ago for single-shot muskets,” he wrote. “They just continue to pound away at the same insane theme: Gun control is the beginning of the government coming to take their guns.”

Lupica’s gun control commentary on ESPN prompted the left-of-center sports site Deadspin to say he made Bob Costas, who went on his soapbox to push for gun control the night after the tragic murder-suicide of Kansas City Chiefs football player Jovan Belcher, look like a “right-winger.”

He then dismissed NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s concerns for the “frightened citizens (of Boston) sheltered in place with no means to defend themselves.”

This is the the type of elitist derision that Palin spoke of on Friday. She said she was inspired that freedom-loving Second Amendment defenders never give up even in the face of such scorn.

Palin said this spirt and resolve is what ultimately “keeps us optimistic,” “what keeps us reloading,” and what “keeps us going.”

“The Washington establishment sneers at you and you don’t give up,” Palin said on Friday to the patriotic NRA convention attendees. “The lamestream media just plain doesn’t get you and you don’t give you up, and you don’t retreat.”